Protesters keep a vigil outside the estate where Pinochet was confined in England, showing red-painted palms, a symbol of silent protest from the post-coup era in Chile.

Chile con carnage

"The Pinochet Case" is the latest of Patricio Guzman's devastating documentaries about dictatorship in Chile, this one covering the attempts to bring General Augusto Pinochet to justice and expose his murderous legacy.

"The Pinochet Case" is no comedy, by a longshot, but it does include one
hysterically funny line. The former Chilean dictator and "Senator for Life" Augusto Pinochet, under house arrest
in England, gets a visit from Margaret Thatcher, who praises his longtime
friendship with the U.K. "I am also very much aware that it's you who
brought democracy to Chile," the former PM says with no visible sign of
irony.

Pinochet, as will be clear from the film even if you aren't
familiar with his reign of terror, is nobody's democrat. He presided over
shocking waves of political kidnappings, tortures, rapes and thousands of
murders after seizing power in a U.S.-backed coup in 1973. This
emotionally wrenching film is an account of his 1998 arrest in England and
the attempt to bring him to justice.

The film's greatest impact comes when surviving torture victims 
some of them for the first time ever  talk about what happened to them
at the hands of Pinochet's military. Men electrocuted, women raped, one woman
forced to watch a man beaten nearly to death and then drag him away to
nurse him while he died. We see some of the torture chambers themselves,
giving horrifying life to the stories the victims have told. We see bones
dug up and skull fragments matched to the bodies they belong to. And we
also see the shelves packed with files on the thousands of people
disappeared and murdered, giving a sense of the sheer number of now-mute
victims.

Augusto Pinochet is received warmly by the Chilean military upon his return from arrest in Europe.

The film profiles the lawyers and judges in three countries who
pursued Pinochet through a patient accumulation of documents and
testimony, and they seem truly heroic for taking on what seemed like a quixotic case. They seem all the more heroic in contrast to Pinochet's defenders. One British friend, a defense contractor who accompanied the general on his annual shopping jaunts to London and accompanied him to visit the British leadership, dismisses his murderous past as simply a kind of Cold War vogue.

"That was the name of the game  you fought communism," he explains. "I say he did that with minimal loss of life."

As this kind of talk suggests, there's an international elite willing to defend the most obscene barbarism when it's carried out by a member of their club. And this is one of the predominant themes you can draw from this movie  that the enemy in the human-rights struggle is not just a tinpot dictator in some faraway Third World hellhole, it's a ruling elite that crosses national borders and resides as easily on Downing Street or Pennsylvania Avenue as in Santiago's Moneda Palace. The powerless wait a long time for justice, and sometimes their only justice is to finally tell their story.

One woman of about 60 vows to go on telling the young people of Chile the truth the rest of her life. "My revenge," she says, "is staying alive."

"The Pinochet Case" almost demands to be seen alongside director Patricio Guzman's previous documentaries "The Battle of Chile" and "Chile, Obstinate Memory," which showed together at the Film Forum a few years ago. The first shows the attack on the country's democratically elected government in vivid detail. The second includes interviews with young people in Chile in which what's most striking is their idolization of the military regime and complete ignorance (or incapacity to speak) of its bloody nature.

"The Pinochet Case"  like the legal proceedings it covers  answers that by giving voice to the victims themselves. Some are mothers whose own daughters are hearing their stories for the first time. Other women wear their murdered sons' and husbands' pictures around their necks as a warning that they will not go away. One woman of about 60 vows to go on telling the young people of Chile the truth the rest of her life. "My revenge," she says, "is staying alive."